Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is being increasingly used by customers for local, long distance and international calls. The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a well-known application-layer control (signaling) protocol for creating, modifying, and terminating sessions with one or more participants. These sessions include Internet telephone calls, multimedia distribution, and multimedia conferences.
Blast calls is a common term which is used in scenarios including situations where: 1) multiple destinations are alerted simultaneously in response to an incoming call setup; 2) the call is then conferenced to the first destination that answers; and 3) calls to the other alerting destinations are terminated. Blast Call functionality is used in many features in, for example, customer installations in different forms such as Parallel Hunt groups, Shared lines (e.g. SIP), call forking scenarios in SIP proxies, etc.
Currently, there is no effective method to support or address blast calls with secured media. Secure blast call functionality is needed for many well-known and predominantly used features, such as shared lines, parallel hunt groups, etc. Thus, a method and apparatus for providing secure blast calls is needed.